Forward Deployed Engineer (Observability / AI)

Remote (East Coast, US)

Salary: $185,000 – $210,000 + 20% Bonus + Equity

About

I’m working with an AI SRE platform that’s genuinely one of the more exciting vendors Runtime partner with. They automate root cause analysis and incident response for enterprise teams running complex multi-cloud environments.

They’re early-stage (seed, ~$25M raised) but already live with Fortune 500 customers and actively taking market share from a major incumbent in the space. The founding team isn’t first-time – they’ve built and exited companies before, with 20+ years combined in the observability space specifically, so there’s real credibility behind the pitch.

The Role

You’ll own the customer relationship end-to-end: onboarding, deployment, troubleshooting and turning customer pain into real product fixes.

You’ll integrate the platform with a customer’s existing observability tools, help them onboard their infrastructure, and be the person in the room when something doesn’t work as expected – debugging it, fixing it, or driving it to the right person on the engineering team.

What you’ll need

• Background in observability or SRE-adjacent work – Grafana, Elastic, Prometheus, Datadog, Dynatrace or similar. New Relic experience is a strong plus
• Comfortable working within AWS and Kubernetes environments – you don’t need to architect infrastructure from scratch, but you should understand how to deploy into it, troubleshoot it, and connect it to a product
• A “figure it out” mindset – when the product doesn’t behave as expected, you dig in rather than escalate and wait
• Strong communication under pressure – comfortable being in the room (or on the call) driving a customer’s team toward a fix
• Startup mentality – hungry, hands-on, not looking for a polished, fully-resourced environment

Not required: prior formal customer-facing title, computer science degree, or big-company pedigree. They care more about what you can actually deliver than what’s on your resume.

Bonus: BigPanda experience; scripting/automation ability (Python, Go, or similar); AI tooling experience.